Street Music, Marching Bands and Popular Protest Mckay, GA

A soundtrack to the insurrection : street music, marching bands and popular protest McKay, GA http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534640601094817 Title A soundtrack to the insurrection : street music, marching bands and popular protest Authors McKay, GA Type Article URL This version is available at: http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/1491/ Published Date 2007 USIR is a digital collection of the research output of the University of Salford. Where copyright permits, full text material held in the repository is made freely available online and can be read, downloaded and copied for non-commercial private study or research purposes. Please check the manuscript for any further copyright restrictions. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. ‘A soundtrack to the insurrection’: street music, marching bands and popular protest George McKay I know that it’s spring and dark winter is past when I hear the sound of the Protestant marching bands. It warms my heart to hear Protestant feet marching once again. For it is the marching bands that are keeping open roads for Protestants to walk upon. Unionist politician Ian Paisley, at a unionist parade in Northern Ireland, 1986 Hey, normal life ends here folks, there is a marching band in your Starbucks, you’re not going to work today! Infernal Noise Brigade at Seattle anti-capitalist actions, 19991 What happens in social movements when people actually move, how does the mobile moment of activism contribute to mobilisation? Are they marching or dancing? How is the space of action, the street itself, altered, re-sounded? The employment of street music in the very specific context of political protest remains a curiously under- researched aspect of cultural politics in social movements.2 Many campaigns are still reliant on a public display, a demonstration of dissent, which takes place on the fetishised space of the street. Such demonstrations claim (some activists say reclaim, suggesting a Golden Age of utopian past rather than future) the transient space of the street, occupy it in short-lived transformative experiments (the day of the march), and do so with sets of structures including what John Connell and Chris Gibson call ‘aural architecture’ (the live performance of marching music).3 What interests me here are the extraordinary sounds of this street music, which is not an everyday practice, but a music of special occasion. By looking at the marching bands of different socio- political and cultural contexts, primarily British, I aim to further current understanding of the idea and history of street music itself, as well as explore questions of the construction or repositioning of urban space via music—‘how the sound of music can alter spaces’; participation, pleasure and the political body; subculture and identity.4 These marching bands are resounding in their similarities— choreography, the rhythm of drumming, uniforms, the contradictory gamut of military and pseudo-military practice—and also so very different from one another— contextually, of course, but in terms of ideology, the politics of repertoire, gender, cultural tradition and innovation, too. For, while indeed social ‘[m]ovements are seen to be the breeding ground for new kinds of ritualised behaviour’, as Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison have argued in Music and Social Movements, some common cultural practices can cut across campaigns in the mobilisation of tradition.5 According to Paolo Prato, the ‘ambulatory way […] of enjoying music […] reveals itself to be the privileged way of the outdoors. A different kind of aesthetic pleasure is 1 obtained through movement’.6 The informal music played on the city street has been produced historically by marginal figures like the war invalid or other disabled person, the migrant group trading on the performance of a weak exoticism real (Italian organ-grinders) or invented (blackface minstrels), the more technically-adept Salvation Army brass band missionary project. Even earlier manifestations of street music included ‘rough music’ or charivari, featuring domestic utensils taken outside and used to make improvised music in an aural public gesture of communal disapproval or rivalry—a variation on expulsion through drumming out. Recent years have seen a new flourish of street music in the figure of the countercultural drop-out busker or community arts worker, or in identity-asserting public processions like the diasporic ones of calypso carnival and mela, or gay pride Mardi Gras. In these musical moments the street is less a space of social poverty, criminality or at least liminality—as formerly—than of cultural celebration and urban energy, ‘suggest[ing] a vibrant cityscape […] that challenges the anonymity (and alternative noises) of public space’.7 In the ‘ambulatory way of listening’ that occurs in the street, ‘music becomes, on the one hand, a part of the environment and on the other hand a part of the body’—its sounds spread outwards and inwards.8 In the context of protest music in the street the rhythmic physical responses of marching or dancing to it are always also in part signs of pedestrian politics—the mass trespass or occupation, or defiant squat, of car-designated urban space, or ‘the symbolic defence of territory (where you can or cannot “walk”)’.9 Within popular music more generally the urban street is one focal zone not simply for activity and energy—the setting of ‘authentic’, usually masculinist, lyrics and videos—but also the street recurs within the landscape or mythography of pop’s moments of political struggle for social change. Within the 1960s counterculture the Rolling Stones celebrated the masculine hero of the ‘Street fighting man’, while in the 1970s the British punk discourse of authenticity, anti-commercialism and working- class consciousness was propounded through the notion of ‘street credibility’, and one of the leading punk political organisations, Rock Against Racism, declared: ‘We want rebel music, street music’.10 From the 1980s on, African-American rap’s privileged topos was the street of the ghetto or hood, where, in its view, contemporary black experience was most profoundly lived and represented. 21st century anti-capitalist marching band Infernal Noise Brigade confirm the apparently now normative connection between the location of the street, the sounds of popular music and the imperative for action towards social change, propagandising that music ‘embodies self-organization and incites people into “dancing … on the ruins of multinational corporations”. These marching bands inspire joy, but also help move crowds, bringing reinforcements to high-intensity situations and renewing courage of those engaged in direct action. They also provide music—an essential component of carnival as it crosses barriers of nationality, ideology, and class. […] Making music is a way of throwing beauty back into the streets—streets in which people really begin to live again.11 Such acts or claims of sonic territorialisation help to form the discursive practice in which profound arguments about, in Susan McClary’s terms, ‘what counts as noise, what counts as order, and who gets to marginalize whom’ are aired.12 The marching bands I am looking at are dominated by male musicians, sometimes exclusively so; 2 the public street as a space of masculine play and display is an expression of culture, power and privilege mirrored elsewhere in popular music, as Connell and Gibson point out. Music contributes to the gendering and sexualisation of space through its role in the creation and maintenance of identity.… The contrast between … the private home as the source of female happiness … [and the] public street as a source of male power is redolent of the spatial gender divisions found in the lyrics of popular music.13 The performance of street music is heavily gendered and must therefore compromise the liberatory claims of at least some of the political movements it accompanies on protest.14 The domestic and public dynamic is approached in other ways too—the ‘propaganda of sound’ that is Infernal Noise Brigade distinguishes between ‘ideology [a]s homework’ and street music as political performance.15 Alongside these questions of cultural value and social power, there is also marching, or dancing, the physical movements inspired by street music; the embodied performance through public music is accessible in the sense that it can be witnessed by passers-by, and it ‘create[s] collective identity and a sense of movement in an emotional and […] physical sense’.16 The ‘unmusic’ that is street music has often had an uneasy relationship with modernity, with urban authority, evidencing its irruptive potential.17 Murray Schafer has argued that ‘[i]t was not the result of legislative refinement but the invention of the automobile that muffled the voices of the street cries’.18 Yet arguably the earlier industrial transport noise of the railway competed first with the human traffic of the informal performance of music in the developing urban open space, while of course there was—and has continued to be—periodic action by government and local authorities to silence the sounds of music in their streets. Already, for example, in the 1830s in Paris there had been legislation passed to control street music.19 Most notoriously perhaps, a campaign by the professional classes of writers, scientists and teachers—people who, in the words of Charles Dickens and 200 other signatories were ‘daily interrupted, harassed, worried,

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